Benjamin Nathans wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction
Nathans, the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History in the School of Arts & Sciences, has taught at Penn since 1998.
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Benjamin Nathans, the Alan Charles Kors Endowed Term Professor of History, has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his book “To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.”
Nathans, who teaches and writes about the Soviet Union and Imperial Russia, among other topics, has taught at Penn since 1998.
His book has been praised as an empathetic, well-researched, and authoritative analysis of the Soviet dissident movement. The Pulitzer committee described it as “a prodigiously researched and revealing history of Soviet dissent, how it was repeatedly put down and came to life again, populated by a sprawling cast of courageous people dedicated to fighting for threatened freedoms and hard-earned rights.”
Nathans is also the author of “Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia” (Berkeley, 2002). He is co-editor of “Culture Front: Representing Jews in Eastern Europe” and “From Europe’s East to the Middle East: Israel’s Russian and Polish Lineages.” He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and his B.A. from Yale University.
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